


we(by a gift called dying born)must grow

by nonisland



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Limbo, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-16
Updated: 2013-08-16
Packaged: 2017-12-23 17:12:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonisland/pseuds/nonisland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mal is almost but not quite as dead as everyone thinks, and Ariadne is the most interesting thing she's seen in dreamspace in a very long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we(by a gift called dying born)must grow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilredridinghood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilredridinghood/gifts).



> This is not quite what you prompted, and I'm sorry about that! I started with your second prompt but it sort of got a little out of control somewhere along the way, and I hope this is acceptable anyway.
> 
> Many thanks to Nell for betaing; any errors that remain are entirely my own fault.
> 
>  **Additional warnings:** depictions of mind control, regarding projections of Mal overriding the ghost-Mal; suicide in dreams as a means of waking up from them.

Mal is.

Limbo is so much more than she and Dom ever realized, when they had had minds that anchored their bodies. It is not just theirs, it is everyone’s, everyone who has ever dreamed with either of them, or any of those, or perhaps someday anyone at all. It is a world to itself and she is its only god. She knows she is dead, because Dom’s guilt draws her to him whenever he slips into dreaming. She hates him for what he did to her only when he is there, when her self that lives in limbo is twisted and compressed into a Fury and drawn up to meet him. The hate, like the broken vow, is his.

She builds herself towers and cities and nations, empires, and looks up at the stars and thinks of more.

Dom brings her world something new one aeon, a mind alight with wonder and joy, shining and lost and reckless. Glorious. The pull of Dom’s guilt is there, and Mal doesn’t fight it, doesn’t work to set one last blossom onto the spring-blooming trees first, just rides it easily up and up and up until she stands between columns and looks at a girl with long straight hair and the joyful eyes of a god of dreaming. In that first look she knows everything Dom does about Ariadne. It isn’t enough.

 _Intruder_ , shouts Dom’s mind, and _rageragerage_ is a whisper only for Mal, and she has a knife in her hand.

 _Come find me_ , Mal whispers to Ariadne, but the words fade before they even leave her mouth. She doesn’t know if Ariadne heard. And Ariadne’s Mal, surely, will be crueler even than Dom’s.

But Ariadne comes looking for her, though she couldn’t have heard Mal’s request—stupid girl; brave girl—and Mal finds herself still unarmed and strangely incomplete.

Dom’s return is a steel band around her chest, crushing the heart out of her, and she reaches for a wineglass and wonders who she is to him now, lover and lost and enemy, and then there is nothing at all but the fury.

* * *

“She was lovely,” Arthur had said, and Ariadne doesn’t think _lovely_ is a word he uses easily, or lightly. She wants to _understand_ Mal, the way she never found a locked door or chest she didn’t want to open, the way she can’t let something new and strange go by without finding out everything about it. She’s aware that she shouldn’t have agreed to get involved in something criminal in the first place, that stealing things from people’s minds should have appalled her. Instead this has woken something inside her that was _meant_ for it, something strange and greedy and dangerous. _International criminal Ariadne Young_ doesn’t sound quite right, though. It’s close, much closer than _respectable citizen and architect Ariadne Young_ would have been, but it still isn’t quite it.

Oh well. In the meantime she’ll be the best international criminal she can be, just like she was the best respectable citizen and architectural student she could be.

She hooks herself up to the PASIV and goes in to tweak the hotel level—Arthur keeps filling in little details that don’t match hers at all and she’s finally decided it would be easier to strip out her own than try to get him to match them. It’s completely empty when she gets there, and then people start arriving, mostly in clumps of two or three or five. Family groups, a few businesspeople. Normal.

Mal Cobb walks in alone, backlit by hazy sunlight, and Ariadne’s heart beats triple-time and then stops.

 _She’s my projection_ , Ariadne reminds herself. _Somehow. Mine, not Cobb’s. Maybe she won’t try to kill me._

“Remarkable,” murmurs one man in a suit to another. “What _presence_!”

Ariadne tries to glare at them without taking her eyes off of Mal. They aren’t afraid. Why aren’t they afraid? There’s a gun in her hand—no, not a gun, she’s not really comfortable with those, there’s a cyanide pill between her teeth. If anyone tries to tear her apart again she’s not waiting around to wake up.

Mal comes toward her.

Ariadne thinks, _it’s under construction. Nobody comes to a hotel under construction._ Her fingers twitch and there’s paper on one of the windows, scaffolding up the walls, paint buckets, silence. Her projections fade.

Mal flickers. Remains.

“What do you want?” Ariadne asks. Her voice is shrill and terrible in her ears. Her heart is beating again, pounding at the bars of her ribs. She can almost feel them rattling.

Mal holds out her hands, empty. Some of Ariadne’s terror eases, but her whole body is humming with adrenaline as Mal comes closer. It’s a dream, after all; what do empty hands mean?

“Do you know what it is—”

“‘To be a lover?’” Ariadne is proud of herself—her voice doesn’t shake at all, even though it’s still too high and it doesn’t sound as ironic as she’d meant it to.

Mal laughs, a real laugh that rings sweet as rainfall against the glossy surfaces of the lobby, and says, “No. Do you know what it is to be a god?” She is beautiful and alluring and terrifying, haloed by sunlight as she reaches out, and Ariadne bites down hard and wakes up before her curiosity can get the better of her yet again.

Alone in the little room she’s set aside for building, she puts a hand to her chest and feels her heart still racing, running away without her.

* * *

Dreaming is business to Dom and everyone he knows now. Everyone except Ariadne, who is still too naïve to be cynical about it, who is still giddy with the power of creation. Limbo is sweeter now that she’s added to it. Mal pulls stars down from the sky and flings them over buildings and onto trees where they glitter and dance, solely because she can. She doesn’t know if she would have thought of that before.

She wants Ariadne _here_ , with her, to do things that have never been done, that could never be done anywhere else—only here, in Limbo, with infinity before them.

Ariadne will come, Mal thinks, eventually. There’s too much curiosity in her to stay away.

* * *

Ariadne doesn’t want to be International Criminal Ariadne Young anymore. Ariadne hates the idea of it. She’d wanted to save the mission—and, okay, she’d been scared for her life—and she’d told Cobb to kill his projection of Mal and then she’d shot the real one, herself, she’d _shot her_ , and now she’s never going to know what Mal meant about being a god.

She’s mostly stopped dreaming just in the short while they’d been preparing for the inception, so she goes looking for a PASIV device for herself. Cobb hadn’t thought to warn her in so many words, but Arthur and Yusuf had both reminded her that a lack of REM sleep could lead to some very unpleasant consequences. It’s logical, Ariadne reasons. It’s the only practical choice, going back into building dreams instead of merely wandering through her own.

She makes the water run backwards up a waterfall and turns flowers into birds, dewdrops into flowers. It’s a downright enchanting forest glade cradling a pond gone mirror-smooth with the waterfall going the other way and there’s nobody around to object when she messes with physics. Or biology. Or any other law of nature.

“I’m not dead, you know,” Mal’s voice says behind her.

Ariadne falls into the pond. She comes up bedraggled and spitting green-flavored water and panicking. “No,” she says. Her voice cracks; the broken word sticks in her throat. She can’t breathe past the denial. “ _No_. I’m not doing this. I’m not going to let you do this to me.”

Mal following Cobb around, through dream after dream, into everyone’s heads, because he couldn’t move past having killed her. The most resilient parasite: an idea.

“I killed you,” Ariadne says. Clearly. Firmly. She has never been clearer or more firm about anything in her life. She’s never had to be. “I’m sorry I did it. Except I shouldn’t be sorry, because you weren’t even _real_ , but I am anyway. I did it to save all of us. I’d do it again if I had to but I’m never going to put myself back in a situation where I might have to again. You’re dead. You were dead when I met you and you’re even more dead now. _Get out of my head_.”

Mal smiles. She’s sitting on a rock by the side of the pond, black skirts spread around her like pieces she’s ripped out of the night sky. She is close enough for Ariadne to reach out and touch (Ariadne curls her muddy wet hands into fists and presses them together). “If you really want,” she says. “But Ariadne? It is not so easy as you seem to think to kill a god.”

She vanishes, then. Ariadne’s fingers scrape painfully against the rock where she’d been sitting.

* * *

It was a little bit of a lie. Mal _had_ died, but Limbo was hers as nothing before it had ever been hers, and when she washed up again on the shore it was in the heart of her own lands, in a dreamscape that remembered her for Dom and for Ariadne and for herself. She doesn’t think she’s lost anything, but everything she has is miracle built on miracle already.

Ariadne invites her back. She’s still frightened, at first, so Mal is gentler than she’s ever been, so incredibly careful to never suggest the Fury Dom had made her into. _I won’t follow you_ , she tries to say without words—since Ariadne doesn’t believe her words—but she doesn’t know how well it works. For a long time, all she can do is admire Ariadne’s cathedrals and landscapes and paradoxes, and try to figure out what she needs to be to gain Ariadne’s trust.

“Is being a god like being a lover?” Ariadne asks one day. The sunset is sapphirine, its flame-blue light staining their skin as they stand watching it from a tower spun from glass.

Mal blinks. If she had ever wanted to show—gently show—more surprise than that she’d lost the habit, somewhere. “Sometimes,” she says. “Why?” Is that what Ariadne’s been expecting of her, all these…how long has it been? The wind catches in her dress, draws the fabric finer. If Ariadne wants to be seduced down into Limbo Mal will happily oblige.

“Being ‘half of a whole,’” Ariadne says. “You’ve hinted often enough that you want me to try it. Is it because Cobb left you and now you need someone else?”

Mal detangles the sentences. Starlight casts golden shadows across the faintly gleaming blue of Ariadne’s skin. Ariadne means being a god, of course.

“Because I don’t want to be half of a whole,” Ariadne continues, oblivious. “I like being me. I don’t want to become less than that.”

“Ah,” Mal says. “No. I want us to be gods of the dreamworld together because your mind is beautiful and the things you make with it are beautiful, and because I’m alone there. A whole universe, and no one but me in it.” She smiles, a little, ruefully. “I was more Dom’s than yours when I said—what was it, there was a poem…”

“‘One’s not half two,’” Ariadne says, quietly, “‘It’s two are halves of one.’” She must have looked it up, or maybe pulled it from the air between them, to have the words so ready on her tongue. Mal nods, and Ariadne sighs. “And now?”

“Now I am someone else.” Mal tries to sound light about it, that she _can_ so easily be other people, a different person to everyone she meets. It’s the same for everyone, after all, isn’t it?

But no it isn’t, no it never will be, not while she walks in normal dreams at the mercy of the dreamer’s mind.

“Come with me,” she says to Ariadne, open to her as she’s never been before. She stretches out a hand and Ariadne takes it, fingers trembling just a little, pulse racing in her wrists and her thumbs like something trapped and yearning. “Stay with me somewhere I can always be myself.”

Ariadne looks at her, eyes wide and dark as the sea. Her lips part. Then she’s closing them again, pulling away, shaking her head. There’s a gun in her hand. “I can’t,” she says, a trace of hysterical laughter in her voice, “you’ve got the wrong heroine,” and shoots herself awake.

* * *

She shouldn’t have said that, about Mal having the wrong heroine. It was stupid and now Ariadne can’t stop thinking about it, a world of the living and a world of ghosts not just a vaguely unsettling parallel but an obsession.

She passes a display of pomegranates at the grocery store and buys one, less impulsively than compulsively. Her hands are filthy by the time she gets it opened, sticky with juice and bitter with rind, and she coaxes loose a clump of seeds—they look a little like red caviar—and carefully, carefully puts one into her mouth.

She wants it to be awful. It isn’t.

It’s sweet, a little tart, fresh and strange, and she sucks it dry and swallows it and eats another, and another, until all that’s left on her plate are the yellow-white pieces of rind.

According to Wikipedia a pomegranate can have anywhere from two hundred to fourteen hundred seeds.

Ariadne hooks herself in and says to Mal, “Will you let me go back? If I change my mind? Whenever I want? Will you wait for me while I’m gone instead of hunting me down?”

“Yes,” Mal says. She relaxes, suddenly, all over, and her mouth curves up in a smile and she holds her hands out to Ariadne. There are rubies in them suddenly, and then there aren’t, and Ariadne takes the six seeds and sets them in her hair, where they turn back to jewels. It’s been a long time since she had a dream this much like one.

Mal’s hands are still outstretched. Ariadne takes them, and leans forward, and whispers, “Take me there” against Mal’s ear, and the sea washes them both away.

**Author's Note:**

>   * The "Fury" that Mal repeatedly describes the projection of herself as is one of/a reference to the Erinyes or Furies of classical mythology, vengeance spirits who hunted down oathbreakers.
>   * Ariadne's surname comes from me having needed one while having just been thinking about Jung and the collective unconscious.
>   * Mal refers to, and Ariadne quotes, the first line/title of a poem by e. e. cummings, which also provides the line that's the title of this fic and, additionally, contains the following stanza: 
>
>> minds ignorant of stern miraculous  
>  this every truth-beware of heartless them  
>  (given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss;  
>  or,sold the reason,they undream a dream)
> 
>   * There are three references, in varying degrees of obviousness, to Ariadne as different women from Greek mythology: a very slanting, sideways hint to her as Pandora; the Persephone comparison that took up just about the entire last section; and another too-vague hint back to the original Ariadne, whose crown Dionysus set in the sky as a constellation, when she puts the jewels in her hair at the end--I'd wanted that one to be clearer, but I couldn't figure out how to do it in-story.
> 



End file.
